<Good. – Falconi>

<How did she think it went? – Kira>

<She said she served with worse trainees in boot. – Falconi>

<Thanks … I guess. – Kira>

He chuckled quietly. <Trust me, coming from her, it’s a compliment. – Falconi>

The mood around the room was lighter than the previous day, although there was an underlying tension that gave their conversations a manic edge. None of them wanted to discuss what was about to come, but it hung over them like an unspoken threat.

The conversation loosened until Kira felt bold enough to say, “Okay, I know this is rude, but there’s a question I have to ask.”

“No, you don’t,” said Falconi, sipping from his glass of wine.

She plowed onward as if he hadn’t said anything. “Akawe mentioned you wanted pardons before you’d agree to go. What for?” Around the room, the crew shifted uneasily while the Entropists looked on with interest. “Trig, you mentioned some difficulties at Ruslan, so … I was just wondering.” Kira leaned back and waited to see what would happen.

Falconi scowled at his glass. “You can’t help sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, can you?”

In a somewhat placating tone, Nielsen said, “We should tell her. There’s no reason to keep it secret, not now.”

“… Fine. You tell her then.”

How bad was it, Kira wondered. Smuggling? Theft? Assault?… Murder?

Nielsen sighed and then—as if she’d guessed what Kira was thinking—said, “It’s not what you imagine. I wasn’t on the ship at the time, but the crew ended up in trouble because they imported a whole bunch of newts to sell on Ruslan.”

For a moment Kira wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “Newts?”

“Yeah, a metric newt-ton of them,” said Trig. Sparrow laughed and then grimaced and clutched her side.

“Don’t,” said Nielsen. “Just don’t.”

Trig grinned and dug back into his food.

“There was a children’s show on Ruslan,” said Falconi. “Yanni the Newt, or something like that. It was really popular.”

“Was?”

He made a face. “All the kids wanted newts as pets. So it seemed like a good idea to bring in a shipload of them.”

Nielsen rolled her eyes and shook her head, which sent her ponytail flying. “If I’d been on the Wallfish, I wouldn’t have allowed such nonsense.”

Falconi took issue with that. “It was a good job. You would have jumped at the opportunity faster than any of us.”

“Why not just grow the newts in a lab?” asked Kira, puzzled. “Or gene-hack something like a frog to look like them?”

“They did,” he said. “But the rich kids wanted real newts. From Earth. You know how it is.”

Kira blinked. “That … could not have been cheap.”

Falconi dipped his head with a sardonic smile. “Exactamento. We would have made a fortune. Only—”

“The damn things didn’t have a kill switch!” said Sparrow.

“They didn’t—” Kira started to say and then stopped herself. “Of course, because they were from Earth.” All macroorganisms (and more than a few micro) grown on colonized worlds had built-in genetic kill switches, to make it easy to manage their population and keep any one organism from disrupting the nascent food chain or, if present, the native ecology. But not on Earth. There, plants and animals just existed, mixing and competing in a chaotic mess that still defied attempts at control.